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The Fixer

Even if she were a man in a grey suit, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega would be conspicuous. Not just because of her position, as the deputy head – and official spokesperson – of the Spanish government. She has also become the country’s number one fixer: she is on the spot everywhere there is a tough job to do in Spain. Now her country’s top problem of immigration has pushed her into a new degree of European prominence too.

Fernández de la Vega is very obviously a woman, and a woman renowned for her polychromatic wardrobe, she is even easier to spot. Despite the nickname she earned for appearing in a fashion magazine – “Fernández de la Vogue” – this is no bimbo on a roll. She has clawed her way up to the highest levels of power against daunting odds, on the strength of a brilliant mind and a steely sense of conviction. Her work schedule rivals that of the notoriously austere Philip II. And her agenda clashes sharply with her appearance.

Her day job is to prepare and co-ordinate all the decisions taken by the socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and then to explain and justify them to the outside world. But Fernández de la Vega is best-known for having personally spearheaded controversial social reforms in a country still clouded by decades of dictatorship and centuries of machismo and religious conformism.

Fernández de la Vega has been a key figure in pushing equal rights for women, lifting barriers to abortion, easing divorce on demand, and bringing in wide-ranging marriage and adoption rights for gay couples. She has helped rehabilitate victims of General Franco’s regime, cut state funding to the church, scrapped plans to make religion obligatory in schools and promoted stem-cell research because of its benefits to patients. She broke new ground in inviting representatives of gays, lesbians, transsexuals and bisexuals to the government’s Moncloa Palace – and, characteristically – posing for photographs with them.

Her iconoclasm has won her massive popularity, but while opinion polls show she is by far the most admired minister in the government, they also reveal that she is detested by a bigger proportion of the population than any of her colleagues. Businessmen have attacked plans for job quotas for women, political grandees jib at new obligations to include women on electoral lists and cardinals have described her changes to family law as “iniquitous”.

But although this paragon of ascetic virtue has attracted resentment and her resolutely single life has provoked predictable speculation, the most assiduous digging by her opponents has yet to reveal any serious chinks in her sharply-tailored mauve-coloured armour. Her critics are reduced to claiming that she has never worn the same clothes twice in parliament and that Fernández de la Vega’s flamboyance contradicts her government’s commitment to sobriety. She charitably dismisses such attacks as persistent manifestations of the machismo she is determined to confront.

The 55-year-old sees politics as liberation from injustice and oppression and describes herself as part of a generation that fought to emancipate women from domination. She says she owes her position not just to her own actions but also “to the many women who fought for full equality”. Her commitment to feminism was inspired, she says, by her Galician aunts Jimena and Elisa, who became Spain’s first female doctors early in the last century – her “best example of rigour, commitment, the fight for justice, equality and solidarity”.

When Fernández de la Vega herself started work, as a low-ranking official in Barcelona, Franco was in charge of Spain and men were still very much in charge of women. She joined the Catalan Communist party and graduated to a select grouping of left-wing lawyers fighting for democracy in the years of Spain’s transition. Subsequently she acquired a solid background as a judge, as a senior official, as a member of parliament, as secretary general of her parliamentary group and as a junior minister – and questions of human and civil rights have been a recurrent theme of her work. Typically, in opposition she was her party’s spokesperson in the committee on justice and home affairs.

Nonetheless, she was the surprise star turn when Zapatero appointed his unisex government in 2004 – the most senior of the women to be awarded ministerial posts and the first woman ever to be deputy head of government. Only days after Fernández de la Vega’s appointment, she made further history by being the first woman since Spain became a democracy to run the country – albeit briefly – chairing a meeting of the Council of Ministers while Zapatero was on a trip abroad.

Paradoxically, she is now presiding over an unprecedented rise in recorded violence against women in Spain and speaks with feeling of “the horror of so many women assassinated in our country” – which she puts down to continued domination, discrimination and a patriarchal model that refuses to allow women equality in society. “The centuries-old fight for women to have not only a voice but also real influence still goes on,” she says.

She makes no secret of her sense of vocation, describing politics as “the most noble task a citizen can undertake… inspired by principles and anchored in convictions, with no room for personal interests and exacting individual sacrifice for the general good”.

Her own colleagues and staff are extravagant in their admiration of her, and strenuously deny that she is a tyrant to work for: Fernández de la Vega is demanding of herself, but she takes care of her team, they maintain. They admit, however, that she allows herself little time for her professed hobbies of reading, cycling and swimming, and the responsibilities of office prevent her maintaining much more than a gesture of involvement in the academic life listed in her official biography. But, they point out loyally, during October she did get to the women’s hockey world cup semi-final and attended an award ceremony for one of her favourite authors, Paul Auster.

Normally discreet to the point of secrecy about her personal life, she has disclosed a soft spot for To Have and to Have Not – the 1944 movie in which sultry resistance fighter Lauren Bacall meets no-nonsense tough guy Humphrey Bogart and they risk all for the sake of an ideal. It’s an intriguing gloss to Fernández de la Vega’s own repeated insistence on “total, absolute and passionate commitment”.

The CV

1949: Born 15 June, Valencia

1970s:First class degree in law, Complutense University of Madrid

1974: Worked as judicial secretary on labour law

1982: Head of cabinet of the then justice minister Fernando Ledesma

1985: Director-general of the ministry of justice

1986: Member of the legal co-operation committee of the Council of Europe

1989: Appointed judge

1994: State secretary of justice

1996: Elected to parliament for Jaén

2000: Elected to parliament for Segovia

2000: Secretary-general of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) group of parliamentarians

2004: Elected to Congress for Madrid

2004:- Appointed first deputy president of the government and government spokesperson